Now, to briefly explore the relationship between Christianity and the Scientific Method here is an overview of each of the above steps with an explanation of how they apply to the development of Christian theology.

(1) Curiosity and Presuppositions.

Supernatural faith plays a role in each of these steps, but it is in this step that the correlation is most obvious. It is also in this step that even pagan scientists (unknowingly) access Christian faith to do their work of science. In fact, we could probably replace the words “curiosity and presuppositions” with “faith” and “supernatural revelation.” It is our curiosity that reaches out beyond ourselves and looks for answers and a structure or order to the universe. It is curiosity that asks “Why?” and “How?” Faith presupposes there is a God that can answer the prayer, “Why did that happen?” and “How can I better understand it?”

For example, if we ask, “Why does water run downhill?” we will discover that science helps to answer a theological question. Water runs downhill because of gravity, which pulls water into the ground and thus waters plants, that allows food to grow, which sustains life. Gravity also pulls water down through many layers of sediment, which remove impurities, and then allows the cleaned water to collect in underground basins and in wells for people to drink, thus sustaining life. In fact, every scientific discovery throughout time points to something called the Anthrophic Principle — a theologically significant concept that everything in the universe (from far away galaxies to subatomic particles) was finely tuned to do one thing — sustain human life.

Science has also discovered that if a closed system is left alone without the intelligent input of energy, it will degrade and cease to function. This is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics or entropy. A car left outside without care will not just cease to run, but will eventually end up as a pile of rust. A garden left untended will be overrun with weeds. A baby left alone without care will die. But when continual, intelligent care (in the form of an intelligently controlled energy) is put into the system, sustained life and beauty result. “The heavens declare the glory of God…” (Ps 19:1-6).

It is only because of an ordered universe, cared for continually by a benevolent God, that the world does not do as the car did. Even secular environmentalists are confounded when a major oil spill or a volcanic eruption threatens to destroy a corner of the earth and after a few years the area recovers and brings forth new life. What we see in all this is physical evidence, scientific evidence, of what supernatural revelation of our faith proclaims. There is an intelligent order, and sustenance at work to give life and maintain it. Science assumes this; that is, it is an act of faith in an ordered (not random) universe that supercedes knowledge. Science, by its “nature”, requires faith in a principle that itself cannot be proven by science. My editor, Dave Armstrong, says: “Belief that the universe is orderly and uniformitarian is a non-scientific premise that is required to do science. Science reduces in the end to philosophy, which in turn requires axioms, and in many ways is not unlike theology.”

Now, space is limited, so we must move on. Notice how faith in what is not seen or understood is ubiquitous to each of the remaining steps. The secular scientist will not call it “faith” but rather a “wonder” or “awe” of what is there. I contend that the secular scientist’s wonder is a near equivalent to a Christian’s faith, if not the preliminary and necessary steps to it.

So, with that basis, let’s move quickly through the remaining steps of the scientific method.

(2) Observations. The Israelites and early Christians observed God’s behavior through physical signs, physical miracles and the physical words and actions of Jesus and the prophets. Note that these observations and experiences are a mixture of reason (observations in nature) and faith (prophetic proclamations).

(3) Hypothesis. The observers form hypotheses about what can be learned from the observations and what they have been told, e.g. “Obey God and you will live. Disobey and you will die.” Or, “Have faith in God and you will be healed, and your sins be forgiven.”

(4) Experiment. Experiments are run to test the hypotheses. These are not always controlled experiments, although science loves such things. But science cannot always run controlled experiments. When an earthquake occurs there is nothing that we can control. Yet we learn from such events. In Joshua 7, Achan buries forbidden loot in the floor of his tent when he was told to destroy it. In Numbers 20, Moses angrily strikes the rock twice to produce water for the Israelites, rather than speaking to it in faith. In Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphira lie about giving all their money to the Apostles. For all of these causes, there is an effect; and Christianity learns from such things. (As we should.)

(5) Theory. When Achan’s loot is miraculous discovered and his family stoned (with real rocks not street drugs), when Moses is prevented from entering the Promised Land because of his disobedience, and when Ananias and Sapphira drop dead — the hypothesis suddenly becomes trustworthy and we claim a theory exists. Scientists and theologians both look for patterns by which to predict future events. In both disciplines the theory is “developing.” Thus, there is both the development of scientific theory and the development of doctrine.

(6) Testing. But after centuries of testing, with the same results…

(7) Rules and Laws take the form of scientific predictability and theological doctrine and even dogma.

Yes, it is true that not all dogma can be tested. But what can be tested gives mighty good evidence that the extrapolations of prophetic utterances of Christ are fully trustworthy. Not everything is tested in science, but the extrapolation of rules and laws allows us to send men to the moon and back, having never done it before.

I was pleased with it, Dr Williams. Most of the images I found showed a bird with its second wing obscured behind the body or the front wing. But that misses the point of what ‘trying to fly with one wing’ looks like.

Thank you for the article. I was delighted to come across it, and I’m now going to read the series from the beginning.

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Why is it so important to the religious -minded that science take them seriously? Is it that they lack faith in themselves?

“Yes, it is true that not all dogma can be tested. But what can (Toad’s itals) be tested…etc, etc…” says the man.

Putting it into a nutshell, where it belongs, that is the whole point. Science does test everything, or it’s not science. The first moon flight was a test. Science can’t take anything on trust. Religion can, and does. So what?
Now let’s test transubstantation.

This reply is a test. Will it come out as Rebrites? Will it be back to the old drawing board?

I don’t see any reason to believe that sustaining life is the sole purpose of the universe. I don’t pretend to know the mind of God. But certainly the odds against the universe supporting human life are so high that some scientist have invented a dogma (I call it a dogma because it can’t be tested) called the multiverse hypothesis.

The cost of an overambitious summary of the first 18 chapters. I apologise for misrepresenting Dr Williams’ point that the truth-seeking practices of the church led to the scientific method as we know it today. Clearly, there were Greek, Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Mayan, and probably Zimbabwean philosophers (and others I haven’t mentioned) who developed and used earlier versions of the method, and each generation of scientists has built on the foundation left by the predecessors they learned from.

I’m glad you’ve sorted yourself out – I’ve had to explain your little predicament to St Wally Chip Fat over at the other place.

Happily, on the flight to South Korea yesterday/today, I finished off Alister McGrath’s excellent ‘A Fine-Tuned Universe’ and then ploughed through in rapid order Hawkin’s ‘The Grand Design’ and John Lennox’s reposte ‘God and Stephen Hawkings’, so I ought to be able to give you chapter and verse. But I’m tired so I’ll keep it short.

Firstly, the case for a Christian impetus to science is strong, but obviously not exclusively so. I shall beat you over the head with Stanley K Jaki on the topic once I’m back in Blighty.

Practically all serious scientists – atheist or otherwise – accept the ‘apparent’ fine tuning of the universe. Many constants are ‘just so’ in order for atoms to be formed, for suns to form, for higher elements to be cooked in those suns, for supernovae to spit that material out, for the chemistry of carbon and water and other things to be supportive of life etc etc. That’s why there are so many books about the topic. The theists love it, of course, while the nay-sayers (such as Hawkings) either suggest it is a happy coincidence (we woudn’t be here to notice a universe not conducive to life), or, Occam’s Razor notwithstanding, they cite the multiverse with its 10 to the power of 500 different universes. Not that you can test for the existence of them, obviously. A bit faith-like, perhaps. And not all athesists are fans of M-theory and the multiverse e.g. Roger Penrose.

Informed believers like science these days. But old Jaki mutters about fools’ gold. The theories will change again tomorrow. Put not your trust in physicists.

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“But certainly the odds against the universe supporting human life are so high that some scientist have invented a dogma (I call it a dogma because it can’t be tested) called the multiverse hypothesis.”

Says Joyful. But as the universe is infinite (which Toad supposes even all of us can agree upon, surely,) the chances of other parts of it supporting ‘human’ life must be infinite as well. And an infinite number of Jesuses, perhaps?

Dogma: A thing that can’t be tested. Now we’re getting somewhere!

And come on, Joyful! There are the early Greek scientists in the Western world and who else? Maybe Arabs who learned plenty from them. But Zimbabweans? Mayans? Give us a break.

The age of the universe is the issue, Toad. No matter how large it is, it hasn’t existed for long enough for the way it is to have come about purely by chance.

My point about scientists from other civilisations is simply that they’ve all developed early versions of our current scientific method. But the scientific method as it exists today would be as alien to Archimedes as it would to Song Yingxing of China. The link with Maya is ridiculous, of course. But the link with Zimbabwe is less far fetched than you seem to think, since the Greeks are very clear that they built their theories on what they learnt in Kemet, which we know as Egypt. The African civilisations of Kemet, Ethiopia, Meroe, and Nok were forerunners and likely to have been strong influences in the later civilisation of Great Zimbabwe.

Modern science arose in the 17th Century. We can trace it back to the Greeks, yes. But if we think we do science now the way the Greeks did science 2500 years ago, we’d be wrong.

Just one point. The universe isn’t ‘infinite’. The post Newtonian consensus was of an infinitely large, infinitely old universe, with no need for any act of creation. There were paradoxes, of course, such as infinite gravity everywhere, and Olbers’ Paradox – why isn’t the night time sky as bright as day if there are an infinity of stars? Then Einstein and Hubble changed everything, the latter with the observation of an expanding universe. Much credit for the notion of the big bang is due to Georges Lemaitre (Oh noes, a Catholic priest!). Few would now contest the evidence that ‘our’ universe (and the time that goes with it) began with a bang that looks suspiciously like a ‘moment’ of creation. Unless you’d be philosophically happier with 10^500 other universes just so you don’t get to feel this one is too special.

No matter how large it (the universe) is, it hasn’t existed for long enough for the way it is to have come about purely by chance.

That is a rather problematic statement JP… and invites the inevitable question….. if.. (following your reasoning) the universe was twice as old as it is, would that raise the probability of it being the result of chance??

I should have made it clearer, Badger, that I was stating what some people believe to be true, based on their calculations. I don’t have a horse in that race. My belief in God is not dependent on probability mathematics.

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Wel, Manus, if the universe isn’t infinite, what is it, in a word? Immeasurable? Expanding? Into what? Unbounded? Semantics.
Toad accepts the Big Bang expanding universe OK. ( “By God, he’d better!”)
Science changed his mind there. He supposes an ‘infinite’ series of Big Bangs, each followed by a Big Shrink. He supposes otheres do..

First, the expanding universe. To quote Hawking from his latest pot-boiler:

“The idea that the universe is expanding involves a bit of subtlety. For example, we don’t mean the universe is expanding in the manner that, say, one might expand one’s house, by knocking out a wall and positioning a new bathroom where once there was a domestic oak. Rather than space extending itself, it is the distance between any two points within the universe that is growing. That idea emerged in the 1930s amind much controversy, but one of the best ways to visualise it is still a metaphor annunciated in 1931 by Cambridge University astonomer Arthur Eddington. Eddington visualised the universe as the surface of an expanding balloon, and all the galaxies as points on that surface. …

“It is important to realise that the expansion of space does not affect the size of material objects such as galaxies, stars, apples, atoms, or other objects held together by some sort of force” (i.e. only the gaps between galaxies) …”This is important because we can detect expansion only if our measurement instruments have fixed sizes.” (p125)

OK the infinite bit. Possibly you’ve tuned in to what you’ve wanted to hear a little bit. There was a time when there was uncertainty over whether the universe would end with a Big Crunch, where gravity ultimately overcomes the impetus of the Big Bang, and some speculated that we might end up with an endless sequence of Bangs followed by Crunches. The alternative was that if there wasn’t enough matter for gravity to triumph, then all would end not with a crunch but a with wimper of cold, expanding gas.

In trying to answer this question, they got into the business of speculation about Dark Matter – because gravitational attraction seemed too big for the amount of matter visible; but the very latest I’ve heard (and I really don’t follow it too closely) is that they have discovered some unexpected acceleration at the very edge of the universe (tied in I think with Einstein’s Cosmological Constant which is one of those balanced parameters – to 120 decimal places if I understand it correctly), so I think the Big Crunch is off.

But don’t worry, you can believe in the Multiverse if it makes you feel un-special.

The fact that Jesus is apparently in every book of the Bible always raises a wry smile. The scriptures all point to Jesus said the early Christians.. no they darn well clearly don’t you upstart sect said the rest of Judaism.
Fancy having the very scriptures that define your identity co-opted. And most galling of all to be told that your tradition (the tradition that actually wrote these scriptures) doesn’t understand what they’re pointing to.

It would have been amusing if the video had ended with someone walking over and saying:

I’m Jewish and I find your first 41 claims to have been presumptuous in the extreme

Yes, you’re quite right, Mr Badger. It must have really got up their noses. But that doesn’t in itself make it wrong.

It surprises me to hear people talk as if this idea of reading Jesus back into the Old Testament is a recent invention. Jesus Himself did it during His lifetime, and stepped it up a notch on the road of Emmaeus. Peter did it on the day of Pentecost. And so on. And then Paul (and many successful missionaries after him) showed the pagan world how their own mythology prefigured Christ.

On one of these occasions when I was sitting beside him, he passed a clipping over to me in which he was referred to as a scientist. Then he said, ‘That’s wrong! I’m not a scientist. I’m an inventor. Faraday was a scientist. He didn’t work for money. Said he hadn’t time. But I do. I measure everything I do by the size of a silver dollar [silver dollars were current coin then]. If it don’t come up to that standard then I know it’s no good.’

His meaning was clear. If his work would sell, if the public would buy and pay their silver dollars for it, then he would know that it was useful. And that was his vocation – the production of new and useful inventions. He was a utilitarian inventor, and money was the only barometer that could be employed to indicate success.” [My itallics. – Tate, Alfred, O., Edison’s Open Door: The Life Story of Thomas A. Edison (1938); Josephson, Matthew, Edison, a Biography (1959)]

Very like a cook or a brewer. And wonderful contributions they make to civilisation, to be sure!

JP is clearly right on this issue. The scientific method is far more nuanced than Toad allows for. Kuhn and Popper relied on this fact for their pay cheques. As did Badger when he was a lowly philosophy tutor. Badger is too lazy to defend this position, but doesn’t have to, he’s right.

“Catholics always right about everything, everyone else always wrong about everything.” Not in my view. This is on a par with: ‘Toad is always right about everything and everyone who disagrees with him clearly adores the Spanish Inquisition.’

Come along now Mr Toad. I do hope you and the lovely Rebrites (and your dogs) have had a nice lunch.

Google is hardly the house journal of the Vatican.

Anyway, perhaps you might accept the opinion of Stephen Hawking on the subject of Archimedes, seeing as how he’s a clear-sighted atheist. Thus (p19-20 of ‘The Grand Design’):

“Apart from the Pythagorean law of strings, the only physical laws known correctly to the ancients were three laws detailed by Archimedes, by far the most eminent physicist of antiquity…. (three laws are described) … But Archimedes did not call them laws, nor did he explain them with reference to observation and measurement. Instead he treated them as if they were purely mathematical theorems, in an axiomatic system much like the one Euclid created for geometry”. So, good, but a long way to go to modern science.

As for Aristotle, whose philosophy was massively influential, of course, (p24):

“Aristotle, however, did not see problems in measurement and calculation as impediments to developing a physics that could produce quantitative predictions. Rather, he saw no need to make them. Instead, Aristotle, build his physics upon principles that appealed to him intellectually. He suppressed facts he found unappealling and focussed his efforts on the reasons things happen, with relatively little energy invested in detailing exactly what was happening. Aristotle did adjust his conclusions when their blatent disagreement with observation could not be ignored. But those adjustments were often ad hoc explanations that did little more than paste over the contradiction. In that manner, no matter how severely his theory deviated from actuality, he could always alter it just enough to seem to remove the conflict. For example, his theory of motion specified that heavy bodies fall with a constant speed that is proportional to their weight. To explain the fact that objects clearly pick up speed when they fall, he invented a new principle – that bodies proceed more jubilantly, and hence accelerate, when they come closer to their natural place of rest, a principle that seems a more apt description of certain people than of inanimate objects.”